Murder in the Garden of God (37 page)

Finally Olivares said, “Your Holiness does not reply, and I cannot divine what you are thinking.”

“I was thinking of throwing you out of these windows,” the pope said, nodding to the long windows high above Saint Peter’s Square, “to teach you with what respect you must speak to the head of the Church.” The ambassador raced out of the audience chamber, down the marble stairs, out into Saint Peter’s Square, and into his waiting carriage. Once in his palace, he “threw himself on his bed and said that he had made a good escape.”
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Olivares wrote his monarch, “You will consider, Sire, if it please you, that I am in Rome exposed to the hatred of the pope, who would not pardon his own father, but I risk my life voluntarily for the service of your majesty.”
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While Sixtus despised the most Catholic monarch in Europe, he was, oddly enough, quite fond of the arch heretics Elizabeth I of England and King Henri of Navarre, who became Henri IV of France in 1589. Both were wily and shrewd, just like the pope himself. Sixtus never gave up hope that Henri and Elizabeth would return to the bosom of the Mother Church. He was right about the king of France, though he didn’t live to see Henri’s 1593 conversion after he decided “Paris is well worth a Mass.” When Elizabeth heard the pope’s oft-repeated belief that she would one day convert, she laughed out loud.

Sixtus often said Europe needed only three monarchs, Elizabeth, Henri, and himself, as all the rest were inept. He dreamt of sitting down to dinner with them, enjoying fine wine and discussing how to rule Europe. One day when speaking of Elizabeth to the Venetian ambassador, Sixtus said, “She is a great queen. If she were Catholic, she would be my most beloved. See how well she governs, a woman who rules only half an island. Despite that, she makes herself feared by Spain, and France, and the emperor. She has enriched herself with spoils taken from the Spaniards and holds them in check in Holland.”
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“What a courageous woman!” Sixtus said to the French ambassador. “She braves the two greatest kings [France and Spain] by sea and land.”
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And to Cardinal François de Joyeuse he remarked, “She is a valiant woman, and if she were not a heretic she would be worth a whole world.
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The king of Spain, Sixtus said, “takes one town and loses two, while a woman can make coalitions with the princes of Germany and Navarre, and find in herself the means of upsetting the whole world.”
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The distaff of the queen of England, the pope often remarked bitterly, was worth more than the sword of the king of Spain. And there would be nothing more glorious than if he and this princess were of the same faith. At one point, he shocked the cardinals and ambassadors by saying, “It’s a pity that Elizabeth and I cannot marry: our children would have ruled the world.”
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Oddly, Elizabeth’s feelings towards the pope were mutual. Though by the time of Sixtus’s reign the queen was in her fifties, offers of marriage still periodically rolled in. The queen’s counselors, knowing child-bearing was out of the question, pushed her to make a political alliance through marriage. A German, Swedish, or Danish prince would be a strong counterweight against a threatening Philip of Spain, who was already building boats. Elizabeth found a way of stopping all such discussion in its tracks by saying that the only monarch in Europe worthy of her hand was Pope Sixtus.

King Philip felt the pope’s admiration for heretics was scandalous. The pope should be trying to convert them, or if that failed, burn them. He certainly should not be praising them while criticizing the most Catholic king of Spain. Philip was creating an enormous armada that would conquer England in the name of the Church and force its citizens to become Catholic. Given the religious nature of his venture, he felt it was only right that the pope offer him moral and financial support. And if France ended up with a Protestant king, Philip planned to wage war there, too, with the pope’s help.

But Sixtus didn’t want a bloodbath in the name of Christ. One contemporary writer reported, “He declared that he didn’t have the spirit to wage a war against anyone, except against wickedness and vice in pursuing to death bandits, assassins, trouble-makers of public peace, and violators of convents… He said there were only two reasons for shedding human blood. The first was for the remission of sins, as Christ our redeemer did with his own blood. The second was for the revenge of the law, which was very necessary because without it no one would be safe from violence and fraud.”
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It is interesting that during Sixtus’s five-year reign, he allowed the Roman Inquisition to execute only five people, including a priest who had become Protestant and another who had violated the secrecy of confession. He gladly meted out violent deaths for violent acts, but was less inclined to punish errors of conscience in the law-abiding.

Bloodshed aside, Sixtus was strongly opposed to Philip gaining any more European territory. In October 1585, Cardinal d’Este wrote, “With regard to the proposed armada, this was bound to occasion alarm among the Christian princes since, although the heresy of the queen gives the Spanish monarch an excuse for his designs against England, there is no possible doubt that what he is aiming at is domination over the whole of Christendom.”
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And that was exactly what Sixtus feared; if Spain conquered England and France, Philip and his obnoxious ambassador would have greater clout when telling the pope what to do.

Sixtus was horrified when Elizabeth cut off the head of the very Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots in 1586 and grudgingly gave Philip the papal go-ahead for the invasion. In 1588, the pope reluctantly excommunicated Elizabeth. But Philip was taking years to build his armada, most of that time lost to his tremulous indecision.

“That Spanish armada gives us anxiety,” Sixtus said. “We have strong presentiments that it will not succeed. Instead of dispatching it in September last year, as we had advised, because in war nothing is so advantageous as promptitude, the king has delayed, hesitated, and given the queen time to prepare against his coming… The king and his armada are becoming ridiculous while Queen Elizabeth knows how to manage her affairs.”
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When the fleet finally set sail in May 1588, it was composed of 153 ships, 8,041 sailors, 19,747 soldiers, 1,000 volunteers, and 2,460 cannon. Plagued by doubts about Philip’s armada, Sixtus only agreed to pay the king a million scudi if it landed on English soil. The pope foresaw Spanish ineptness, countered by English courage and cleverness, though he couldn’t anticipate the violent storms that scattered the Spanish fleet when it appeared before the English coast in August.

The armada was a financial debacle for Philip, whose ambassador was soon pounding on the door of the papal audience chamber demanding the pope break open his Castel Sant’Angelo treasure chests to pay Philip the promised million scudi. The pope steadfastly refused, pointing out that the only Spaniards who had
landed
on English soil were drowned sailors washed ashore, and that didn’t count.

A monkey dressed as a Spanish naval officer had swum ashore, but the locals, who had never seen a Spaniard or a monkey, and couldn’t understand the monkey’s chattering, thought the dark hairy little person was a Spaniard and hanged him. That didn’t count either. The pope was certainly not going to dip into his cherished coffers to rescue the stupid Spanish king. He continued to save his million scudi a year, piling it up in enormous chests in Castel Sant’Angelo and periodically thrusting a long stick into the heaps of gold coins.

Chapter 29

Fall of the Colossus

A good name is better than fine perfume,

and the day of death better than the day of birth.

–
Ecclesiastes 7:1

S
ixtus had enjoyed robust good health for almost his entire pontificate. In 1587, he had a high fever and fell into either a deep sleep or coma. All the cardinals were supposed to make a big show of going to the local churches and, kneeling solemnly in front of a crucifix, pray for the pope’s recovery. But many Romans believed the cardinals were, in fact, asking God to put Sixtus out of their misery.

At one point, the pope’s doctor was alarmed that his patient had so little color in his face. Believing him to be unconscious, the doctor thwacked the pope’s nose to see if any blood rushed to it. The pope opened his eyes immediately and said in an angry voice, “You have a lot of nerve to thwack the nose of a pope.” According to the chronicler, “The poor doctor was horrified, believing the pope would never again want to see a man who had placed his hands on his nose. He ran home and took to his bed with a fever, which in a few days killed him.”
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Unlike the doctor, Sixtus recovered quickly from the illness, which might have been malaria, a common complaint in Rome, and especially in the Vatican, which had been built on top of a low-lying swamp. Aside from bouts of insomnia, he remained healthy until April 1590, when he developed flu-like symptoms, headaches, and a bit of fever. Though his appetite remained strong, he began to look haggard. In June, he suffered from cold sweats and high fevers.

The pope had good days and bad, and on every one of them he worked at least twelve hours, sometimes many more. On August 10, against the vehement protests of his doctors, Sixtus went to a church service celebrating the return to Catholicism of the German margrave of Baden. He returned from the service sicker than ever. When his nephew, young Cardinal Montalto, begged him to rest a little, Sixtus replied, “You must know, my nephew, that a prince only stops commanding when he dies. He is like the nightingale, who sings until death.” To others he said, “A prince must die in action.”
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On August 20, the pope had another violent shouting match with the Spanish ambassador. “Does the king want to become pope?” he thundered, referring to Philip II. “In that case we should make him a cardinal first.”
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After Olivares protested, the pope cried, “We are not the servant of your king. We do not owe him obedience nor an account of our actions. We are the father of all Catholics and do not expect that our children, without being asked, impose their advice on their parents… You, who carry a sword at your side, do you believe that you know theology better than we, who have studied it all our life? With what right, during the heat of August, do you come to molest us? You would have done better to have stayed home.”
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After the audience, Sixtus developed a violent fever. The next day, he insisted on meeting with the cardinals’ committee of French affairs, but when he spoke, he rambled unintelligibly. On August 23, he was back to being himself and dealt with affairs of state; by evening the fever had disappeared. The following day, he presided over a meeting of the Inquisition. He had no appetite but an insatiable thirst.

On Sunday, August 26, the pope agreed to his doctors’ recommendation that he receive a suppository to draw out the feverish humors in his body. But instead of improving, he became markedly worse. The following day, it was clear that he was dying. When his grandnephew Cardinal Montalto asked him how he felt, he said weakly, “I have a great heat in my head, which seems to be on fire.”
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His last official act was to assign a large bread subsidy for the people of the Papal States as harvests had been bad and the price of bread was rising rapidly.

Some cardinals brought Sixtus the holy sacrament as his last communion, but his throat was so swollen he could not swallow it. A priest gave him extreme unction, anointing his body with holy oil, as the pope slowly breathed out the fire of his soul. “In that instant when he gave up his soul,” wrote one contemporary, “the most extraordinary thing happened. It began to thunder and lightning, the sky becoming black and wild, with clouds full of fire racing towards the Monte Cavallo Palace, where his Holiness was, shooting out thunderbolts, one of which they say struck the arms of the pope above the gate of the Jews.”
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Romans wondered if the Devil were coming to take Sixtus for executing so many people. Others thought it was God welcoming him home with a dazzling show as the heavens opened to receive him.

Doctors loved performing autopsies, and it was especially amusing to pry open royal bodies, bring out the organs, and give them a good poke. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a clue what they were looking at. Was that abnormality in the stomach a cancerous tumor which had slowly caused death? Or was it the sudden result of poisoning? Or perhaps it had nothing at all to do with the death? In the 1590s, physicians examining the corpse of King Henri IV’s mistress agreed that she had, in fact, been killed by a “corrupt lemon.”
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And now, as they prodded the cadaver of Sixtus, they found “very sincere” intestines
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– probably meaning healthy – and a “rotten”
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brain with some water on it. Physicians of the time believed all food and smells ended up in some form in the brain – clearly alcohol did, so everything else ingested must also find its way up there. According to this theory, it was not impossible that poison could have traveled north instead of south.

Some wondered about the deleterious effects of the enema he had received the day before he died. In 1517, several cardinals had bribed the physician of Pope Leo X in a thwarted plot to give him a poisoned enema; given his sexual proclivities, they saw this as a fitting end. In the case of Sixtus, after some debate it was agreed that poison administered through the rear end couldn’t rise up to rot the victim’s brain while leaving his guts sincere.

There were ample reasons for Spain to kill the pope. Sixtus had stymied Spanish pretensions in France, publicly admired Queen Elizabeth, insulted Spanish ambassadors, refused to pay for the armada and, more recently, he had seemed to be angling to take back the kingdom of Naples. The Spanish protested loudly that they had not killed the pope – though they were certainly glad he was dead – and their enemies the French were spreading the slanderous rumors of Spanish poison. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that Sixtus was poisoned. He had felt unwell for months with intermittent fever and headaches, while poison was usually administered in one fatal dose.

Due to the ghastly heat, the pope was buried temporarily under Saint Peter’s Basilica. A year later when, it was hoped, he would be reduced to non-odiferous bones, he would be taken in a solemn procession to the tomb he had prepared for himself in his favorite Church of Saint Mary Major, just across from his gorgeous Villa Montalto, and his beloved gardens.

Sixtus had often said, “I am convinced that the Romans will slide back into their disorders under another pontificate.”
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And he was right. Succeeding popes would gleefully dig into the money he had so carefully put aside, spending it wildly. More merciful Vicars of Christ would return to the hallowed tradition of pardoning murderers, rapists, and robbers, setting them at liberty to begin committing crimes afresh. But many of Sixtus’s achievements still exist as lasting testimony of his incredible reign – those tourist magnets, his obelisks; his wide, straight Roman roads; his life-giving aqueducts; his expanded Vatican library and printing press; and his light-filled Vatican apartments where pontiffs have resided since his time.

Never before Sixtus had a pope achieved so much in so few years, and never after. The Venetian envoy, Paolo Paruta, wrote, “Anyone who sees the many and extraordinary works of Sixtus V, the long aqueducts and the public fountains, the streets and palaces and churches, could hardly believe that all this had been brought into being in so short a time.”
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Shortly after the pope’s death, the Benedictine abbot Angelo Grillo returned to Rome after a ten-year absence. He wrote a friend, “Here I am in Rome, and yet I cannot find the Rome I know; so great are the changes in the buildings, the streets, the piazzas, the fountains, the aqueducts, the obelisks, and the other marvels with which the glorious memory of Sixtus has beautified this old and ruinous city, that I cannot recognize nor find, so to speak, any trace of that old Rome which I left ten years ago, when I came away; and so it would seem to your lordship if you saw it in its new guise.”
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Sixtus’s early chronicler wrote, “Only Christ, as God, who can do anything, could have done more than Pope Sixtus in five years.”
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